The latest bulletin from the administration with an all-of-the-above energy policy:
The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of new conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.
The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural-gas plant emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.
Industry officials and environmentalists said in interviews that the rule, which comes on the heels of tough new requirements that the Obama administration imposed on mercury emissions and cross-state pollution from utilities within the past year, dooms any proposal to build a new coal-fired plant that does not have costly carbon controls.
Who needs that pesky Congress that refused to enact cap-and-trade? Forty percent of the country's electricty is produced by coal, and we have more recoverable reserves of it than anyplace on earth. Indiana is the nation's 10th-largest producer of coal. Don't worry, though. We're being sacrificed to the greater good of ending global warming.
